The migration to cloud computing for enterprise solutions has created some unique challenges that relate to managing “per seat licenses.” For example, a 50-user per-seat license allows up to 50 individually named end users to access the program.
Generally, per seat licensing is managed by a System Administrator and administered by providing specific end users with access to the software. Typically, monitoring software is used to determine the number of end users accessing the software.
There are various limitations associated with the System Administrator controlling or managing the per seat licensing in a cloud based enterprise software implementation. For example, the System Administrator (SA) must determine which end users are going to access the licensed software; and since it takes time to communicate with each end user about software usage, the SA generally issues a seat license to individuals or groups that the SA believes would use the software. The result ineffectively issues licenses to end users. On the other hand, the SA may speak directly with end users and end users may express an interest in the enterprise software, but may never use or access the software.
From the end user perspective, a particular end user may be unable to access the software because the SA has determined that other end users are entitled to access the software. Additionally, there may be circumstances when an end user may only need to use the software for a particular time period. After the time period is completed there is no need to access the software; so the licensee is effectively not optimizing the per seat license by not being able to transfer a per seat license from one end user to another end user.